Blog Action Day 1 - Poverty in Austin

Today we begin with a description of one of Austin's organizations helping face poverty.

Foundation for the Homeless: Keeping Families Together In Shelter and Beyond

On any given day in Travis County, 25,000 children between the ages of 5 and 12 reside in families with incomes below the Federal poverty guidelines. (Census data). These are the families most likely to join the ranks of the “invisible” homeless--families who continue in school or work while living with friends, other family, in hotels or in their car. Most often, these families have been pushed out of their homes by some catastrophic event such as illness, job loss, transportation loss, loss of a loved one, mounting debts or a bad divorce.

Foundation for the Homeless, Inc. is the only organization in the Austin area that routinely provides shelter and case management services to intact (two parent) or to single father homeless families. Each family gets its own room or private space. Other shelter programs generally split-up families by gender, serve only single-parent families, serve only families where the parents are younger than 25 or serve only immigrant families. Foundation for the Homeless also serves single-parent, young and immigrant families, provided they have one or more children under the age of 18.

FFH provides shelter and case management services to families through its Interfaith Hospitality Network Shelter Program (IHN) and Passages Supportive Services Program. During 2007, the IHN Shelter Program served 35 families or 105 individuals, including 65 females and 40 males. Approximately 2/3 or 65 these individuals were children under age 18: 31 were age 5 and under; 19 were ages 6 through 12; and 15 were ages 13 through 17.